Savannah gets all of the attention when it comes to weird and wonderful points of interest, but nearby Hilton Head Island, South Carolina has a few oddities of its own that are worth seeing.
Hilton Head is a premier resort destination for golfers and nature lovers, but if things had turned out differently, it could have been stripped of its beautiful trees for lumber. That was certainly the intention when Charles Fraser was sent there by his family lumber business to start chopping. At the time, only about 500 people lived on the island — mostly farmers and oyster workers.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Chris Berinato
Credit: Photo courtesy of Chris Berinato
But Fraser was so taken in by the natural grandeur of Hilton Head that he asked his father to grant him control of the island so that he could develop real estate on it.
After finishing Yale Law School, Fraser founded Sea Pines Company and began building world-renowned golf resorts and communities on the island's south end. Because of his love for the trees that he was originally supposed to cut down, Fraser drafted covenants and restrictions protecting the trees and making them the focus of development.
Homes had to be neutral colors so that they wouldn’t stand out amongst the trees. Winding roads and bike paths drew attention to the trees instead of the buildings. And strict rules were set limiting the size of trees that could be removed from a homeowner’s property.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Chris Berinato
Credit: Photo courtesy of Chris Berinato
In 2011, to honor Fraser’s role in building Hilton Head, a pair of charming sculptures created by Savannah artist Susie Chisolm were unveiled in Compass Rose Park at 4 St. Augustine Place depicting Fraser casually strolling alongside an alligator.
The reference for this unusual pairing was from a photo published in 1962 in the Saturday Evening Post for a feature about Sea Pines. In the photo, Fraser, who was 32 at the time, was captured happily walking with an alligator while showing off his new development.
Fraser died in 2002 when his 28-foot Sun Dance yacht exploded and threw him, his wife, his daughter, and others into the water where he drowned, but his legacy as a tree-hugging real estate mogul is forever set in bronze. Nobody knows for sure what happened to the gator.
If you’ve got the “time,” there is another impressive statue worth visiting in the area.
Hilton Island may be a popular golf vacation destination for us mere mortals, but even the Roman God of the Sea appreciates the area’s breezy waterfront dining and fashionable shopping options. Not really, but you can still see a striking representation of King Neptune towering god-like in front of Shelter Cove Harbour at Palmetto Dunes, 13 Harbourside Lane.
The 12-foot tall bronze statue of King Neptune wielding his famed trident is the largest figurative sundial in the world (King Neptune is big, but the tallest sundial in the world is the 73-foot-tall Samrat Yantra in Jaipur, India).
The bearded statue stands at the top of a 26-foot diameter sundial with his trident thrust toward the ground — as though he were spearing the Kraken — acting as the gnomon that casts a shadow on the dial. Numbers arranged around the dial accurately indicate the month and hour of the day.
The King Neptune sundial was sculpted and installed by artist Wayne Edwards in 1983. It was cast in Princeton, New Jersey and then shipped by truck (not sea?) to Hilton Head Island.
In an act of scientific engineering, with a history that can be traced back to ancient Egyptian and Babylonian times, careful measurements were made to make sure that the one-ton statue was oriented to face true south by lining up his trident with the North Star and Ursa Major. The sundial is fully functional and although it doesn’t tell the exact minute of the hour you can still use it to make sure you don’t miss your tee time.
Christopher Berinato is the author of "Secret Savannah: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure."
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: That’s So Savannah: Neighboring Hilton Head home to fascinating sculptures
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